For those of you tuning in late, back in 1991 I wrote this program
called XDaliClock, which is a clone of a
similar program that I had on my
Mac in 1984. I sold that machine in
like, 1987, and I'd been halfheartedly trying to find another ever
since, because as time went by, I came to covet a
machine that was still capable of running the
original Dali Clock.

Well, back in April 2002, my pal
Cyan bought
me one! ("Model M0001"!) It was hard to find an original Mac
from 1984, because they weren't on the market very long (the 512k "Fat
Mac" came out shortly after, and many of the 1984 Macs were
upgraded to those.)

Some time later, I finally managed to get the original Dali Clock
running on it. That means that I now have a dedicated Dali Clock
Appliance, made of the absolute wimpiest computer capable of generating
that effect.

Even the original Palm Pilot (on which XDaliClock also runs) is a
way beefier computer that the original Macintosh is: the
screens are almost the same resolution, but
the Pilot's CPU is at least 4x faster (maybe more?) and it had 1 or 2
megabytes of RAM. The Mac had
128K. K.

Dali Clock Family Reunion

This was quite a production. I had files that purportedly
contained the Dali Clock executable, that had been floating around in
my home directory for a decade, and I needed
to find a way to get those files onto the Mac.

No floppy drive manufactured since 1996 (or earlier?) can read
or write 400K disks. (Or the 800k double sided variant.) Apparently
modern disks are made of
different material and are written with a
different magnetic field strength, so it's a hardware issue, not
software.

(The reason you (generally) can't read Mac disks on a PC is that
Mac drives spin at variable rates, to fit more sectors on the outer
tracks, whereas PC drives spin at a
constant rate. However, the reason you can't use modern ("high
density") floppies in an old ("single" or "double" density) drive is
that the magnetic materials are different.)

No Mac that does have a disk drive that can write 400K disks
also has ethernet.

For that matter, no Mac manufactured
since 1999(?) years comes with a floppy drive at all!

So, here's how I did it.
Barry loaned me a Mac Classic II
that he had lying around (it's toaster shaped, but has a hard drive!
Oh, BTW, you could get a hard drive for the original Macintosh: it
plugged into the serial port.) I used the Classic II to format a
modern floppy disk. I tracked down a USB floppy drive. I downloaded the
files using an iMac, and wrote them to that floppy. (The iMac can read
disks formatted on the Classic II but not vice versa.) I got the files
onto the Classic II's hard disk that way.

Then I had to figure out how to unpack
the files, because there were several layers of decade-obsolescent
packager formats wrapped around them, the trickiest of which was PackIt
(which apparently only Jurassic versions of Stuffit Expander can read:
versions which only run on Jurassic Macs...)

Finally, I formatted a 400K disk on the 128K Mac (a disk that came
with it, i.e., a disk manufactured in 1984) and copied the files from
the Classic II's HD to that. And, success!

The original (Steve Capps) version of Dali Clock only works on the
128K Mac: it crashes the Classic after one second. However, in 1987,
Ephraim Vishniac disassembled the original clock binary and hacked it
to work on (then-) modern Macs. So (for the sake of completeness) I
was able to get his version working on the Classic II (OS7.) Sadly,
that version does not work on OS9 or OSX, though surprisingly, it
doesn't crash OS9. It seems to be assuming a 1-bit display, so you
just get some static at the top of the screen.

``Why in my day, we had to XOR our forward and backward lists pointers
into the same word!''

``You had XOR? Luxury!''

My 128K Dali Clock Appliance ran like a trooper for a few months,
though it couldn't keep time worth a damn: it ran ten minutes ahead
after only about four days! That's pretty bad.

Then, after sitting there running the clock for three or four
months, the monitor died: it boots, but now it only displays a
horizontal white line.